05/09/2026
Sardinia, this morning.
There’s a man who swims in the same spot every day at seven. That’s the whole routine. No optimising, no plan, no five-year horizon. Just the water, at seven.
And I sat there realising it’s more or less the exact thing I spent my twenties in audit working toward.
I’m not going to tell you they’ve cracked it and we haven’t — that’s a tourist’s take, and young people leave this island for exactly the reasons you’d expect. The work isn’t here. That’s real, and it doesn’t make for a nice caption.
But something in it is still true: the life most of us are working toward costs far less than we think it does.
We’re not working for the life. We’re working for the version of it that needs a corporate salary attached — the bigger place, the newer car, the upgrade nobody asked for. The thing itself? Time, sun, food, people who like you. That part was never expensive.
Which matters more than it sounds, because the number you’re aiming at determines how many years of your life you spend earning it. Get the number wrong and you overpay in the only currency you can’t get back.
Most people have never actually worked theirs out. They’ve absorbed one from somewhere — a headline, a YouTube video built for a different country — and are quietly working toward a figure that was never theirs.
That gap — between what a good life actually costs and what we assume it costs — is most of what I talk about.
What are you working toward? And have you ever actually put a number on it? 👇
Follow along — I break down how money really works, one piece at a time.
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